Databases: An obstacle to DevOps progress?

Delphix along with Gleanster Research recently published a survey on the state of DevOps. What really jumped out at me was the section of the report titled The State of Data in DevOps – How data management affects DevOps.

The results of the survey demonstrated that the database is a major obstacle in the way of DevOps success – across the entire application.

The report states that the biggest challenge facing DevOps initiatives among both Practitioners and Leaders is limited testing environments due to data issues. One-third of Practitioners and nearly half of DevOps Leaders report this as the primary challenge with productivity.

But this inefficiency affected DevOps Leaders disproportionately, with 62 per cent reporting access to full data as a requirement for non-production environments and only 44 per cent of Practitioners reporting the same.

Today, applications teams are moving faster than the organisation can keep up. One-third of all respondents to Delphix’s survey indicated their organisation has a difficult time keeping up with the rate of software delivery from teams engaged in DevOps practices.

The report also revealed that DevOps Practitioners are working around data security constraints and taking data environment setup and teardown into their own hands. This would explain why 55 per cent of Practitioners and 79 per cent of Leaders reported Agile Data Management as the most common DevOps practice adopted.

Delivering software faster and more frequently calls for more rapid approaches to quality assurance and release verification. With the increased pace of development and testing, organisations are under pressure to create testing and staging environments that can support frequent testing efforts. This is required to support the sort of agile software delivery practices that often accompany DevOps.

The survey data suggests that companies with a commitment to DevOps are more likely to require full production data for both QA and development activities.